Friday, February 13, 2009

Google (and other) Maps Friday Fun

Street View of the WeekI have my suspicions about the authenticity of this Street View. Gizmodo have a lot more of these, some of which look distinctly Photoshopped.

WorldMasterThis Google Maps for Flash API built game from Austria is good fun. To play the game press 'Neues Spiel' and then just double click on the country whose flag you think is being shown. After ten seconds, if you haven't had a guess, then the name of the country is given in German.

So you can learn the German for different countries at the same time as learning their flags. Cool.

Me: “Thank you for calling **** Travel, this is ****, how can I help you today?”

Customer: “Um, yes. You’re located in Alaska, right?”

Me: “Yes, sir.”

Customer: “Is that near Hawaii?”

Me: “No, sir. Not at all.”

Customer: “Yeah, I wanna talk to a manager. This map shows y’all are right next to each other, and I wanna know why one’s so dang hot and the other’s so dang cold.”

Me: “Sir, you’re actually reading the insets on a map of the continental United States. Alaska and Hawaii are several thousand miles apart.”

Customer: “I don’t believe you.”

Google Maps Surpasses Mapquest or NotThe Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search blog thinks that Google Maps has overtaken Mapquest as the most used online map. Their statistics come from Compete.com and look at worldwide traffic.

However, ReadWriteWeb use the latest data from Hitwise to show that Mapquest still has the lead in the US - just.

And, if you care enough to have read this far, you could head over to Lifehacker where you can actually vote on whether you think Mapquest or Google Maps is best.

If you think it is OSM - just leave an angry rant in the comments.

The Euro Invasion of FranceStrange Maps has an interesting map of the spread of non-French Euro coins in France. Tracking the spread of coins that originate from other countries in the European Union provides a great means to see what areas in France the Spanish, Germans and Italians like to visit.